Freelance Writer

The Secret Sales Kings of Amazon

Last fall, every other week or so, I took the F subway train all the way to its last stop in Queens. Then I boarded the Q65 bus and took that all the way out to its last stop—a quiet, warehouse-lined street out by the water in College Point. When I arrived I was usually the only passenger left on board.

I was headed there to hang out with the guys who run Pharmapacks, a company that ships over 570,000 products every month selling on platforms including Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.com. For the past couple years I've been fascinated by the Amazon.com Marketplace. The site's bazaar of independent sellers generates nearly half the retail site's sales. It includes over two million sellers. Yet we, their customers, know almost nothing about who these sellers are and how they operate.

The entrepreneurs behind Pharmapacks — Andrew Vagenas, Jonathan Webb, Brad Tramunti, James Mastronardi, and Adam Berkowitz — kindly took me under their wing and showed me how they built this huge business selling on online platforms. In addition to being very clever guys, they were also some of the funniest entrepreneurs I've ever had the pleasure of writing about.